In many instances, television broadcasters undertake live production of a program, such as live production of a news program, for over-the-air broadcasting. Television stations undertaking such live production often insert advertisements and/or public service announcements (hereinafter collectively referred to as “advertisements”) between the content segments. The advent of alternative modes of distribution, such as satellite and cable, afford the opportunity to distribute programs over a much greater geographic area than the reach of traditional over-the-air television broadcast signals. Indeed, the growing popularity and virtually unlimited reach of the Internet as a mode for distribution of television programs affords ever greater opportunities than are available by cable or satellite distribution.
The opportunity to distribute content over a much wider area than previously available gives rise the ability to tailor advertisements for different communities. For example an advertisement for a restaurant or other local establishment will likely not interest distant television viewers. Moreover, the ability to insert different advertisements in a given “time slot” in different geographic areas maximizes revenue because the program producer can sell the same time slot multiple times.
The ability to manipulate previously recorded television content generally poses few difficulties, especially with the advent of sophisticated non-linear editing technology that has become widely available. However, the ability to manipulate content during live production remains problematic. While replacing existing content during live production with content of the same length can occur with little difficulty, problems arise when the replacement content has a different length. Replacement content of a shorter length generally gets padded with filler content, which can alienate a viewer.
Presently, no good method exists for decreasing the overall duration of a live production. For example, imagine that a content segment contains two stories that cannot under live transmission to a web site for what ever reason. The content subscriber viewing such content from the web site would endure minutes of dead air (during the live stream). Attempting to switch to alternate content might not prove feasible if the content is not readily available.
Thus, a need exists for inserting new content into a live stream which overcomes the aforementioned difficulties.